


Fallow Words

by Orockthro



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Book 3: HMS Surprise, Hurt/Comfort, Queer Platonic themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:40:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4319865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s so thin, laid out on top of the cot, the swath of white bandage hiding the carnage, but not Jack’s memory of it. He clutches his pen tighter at the half-blurred remembrance; Stephen’s heart pumping frantically, visible to all and sundry and even now turning Jack’s vision gray. Gray like Stephen’s face, except for his cheeks which flush pink with unhealthy fever.</p><p><i>(Or, set near the end of </i>HMS Surprise<i>, Jack watches over Stephen during his delirium, and begins understand that love is a complicated thing.</i>)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallow Words

**Author's Note:**

> I am quite new to the Aubrey-Maturin series, and falling for them very fast. I just finished the third book and felt the need to expound. I know there are a dozen fics out there that touch on all this already, so hopefully it's not superfluous.

He’s so thin, laid out on top of the cot, the swath of white bandage hiding the carnage, but not Jack’s memory of it. He clutches his pen tighter at the half-blurred remembrance; Stephen’s heart pumping frantically, visible to all and sundry and even now turning Jack’s vision gray. Gray like Stephen’s face, except for his cheeks which flush pink with unhealthy fever.

Jack sets down his letter and pen, ignoring the splotch of ink that settles at the corner of the page. Sophie won’t mind, provided she will ever wish to see him again. He goes to his friend and wrings a cloth from the bucket of clean water sitting on the floor, the one Killick had brought fresh not an hour ago, knocking and telling him it was outside. His orders to leave the doctor to his care, to not come in under any circumstance save their impending demise, had been well kept.

As he wets it and runs it down Stephen’s face, a stream of half-lucid and half-mad words pour from his particular friend’s lips, and tears run down his face. Jack feels like weeping too, for the act of having to sit here and listen to Stephen’s madness nearly brings him to his own.

“Stephen, brother, do not fret.”

Stephen writhes in the cot, pushed to and fro by a gentle swell in the sea, and Jack grasps his hands to still him. The fever is hot, pooling heat in the palms of his hands and sending it through Jack like something wild. He brushes his hair from out of his half-lidded, colorless eyes. It is unkempt in the best of circumstances, but now, lightened slightly in the Bombay sun and without even his minimal care for it, he has the look of a dying animal, wild and mad and so very small.

Jack closes his eyes, lets his head fall to rest against Stephen’s brow, and says, “Please, joy, I beg of you. You must get well.”

Stephen is raving again. Only sleep quiets him, an infrequent and slender reprieve, and in those moments Jack is almost always afraid he’s dead, always presses his hand into the space above those quiescent lips and prays for breath. He doesn’t dare lay his hand against that chest, for fear he’ll cave it in. Healing it may be, he is assured, but fragile. He swallows against the image of white bones and ribs and the pulsing flow of thick blood that ran over Stephen’s body, over Jack’s own hand as he held onto him during the operation. He’d been so weak, sickened by not the blood but the feeling of Stephen under his hand. Stephen. Stephen who had done this to himself all for the sake of a love that Jack knew, undoubtedly, was neither reciprocated nor worth Stephen’s life. And Jack is now the one who must hold him, watch him wither away, mad and unlike the friend he knows and loves.

The hands writhe weakly in his own, and Jack studies them. How long ago Mahon seems. But it is neither long ago, nor long behind them, as the damage clearly illustrated down one thumb and up a finger attests. He runs a broad finger down a slender one. The knuckles protrude, and the second and third fingers of his right hand both cant to the side rather than lay straight. The fourth finger, the little one, is damaged the worst, and Jack holds its fingernail-less little end between his fingers and massages it. Stephen never said as much, but they ache. He rubs at his knuckles, at the scars across his thumb, when he believes no one is looking. And so insensate and incapable of doing so himself, Jack does the massaging for him. It is no doubt the smallest hurt he has right now, but it is the only one Jack has even the slightest hope of alleviating.

He’s muttering again, this time in his Catalan mother-tongue, a language Jack is still utterly without but can now recognize easily enough, especially when on Stephen’s lips. He may not understand the words, but he understands the intensity. It has to do with Diana, no doubt. Or perhaps his dealings in Ireland, that Jack now knows so much more about than he’d wished to. Or perhaps it has to do with Jack himself. He does not wish to know, and prays Stephen keeps to tongues he is incapable of comprehending.

“Do you think, Stephen, things will ever be as they were between us?”

Stephen makes a keening sound that breaks Jack’s heart, and he strokes his face again, wiping sweat and tears from his skin in equal quantities.

“Hush, plum. Everything will be fine. I will marry Sophia, and perhaps Diana will come around to you as well. She is a fool not to.”

He quiets for a bit, laying back limply in the cot and his eyes finally slipping closed. A reprieve that lasts a minute before his stillness brings a rushing fear and anxiety up Jack’s bosom and through his throat, and he cries out softly, reaching for Stephen’s hands and once again reassuring himself that there is breath in his lungs.

“Lord, Stephen. The things we have been through. I hardly know how to put them into words. I’ve tried to tell Sophie about them, you know. Even before... all this. I couldn’t even get half of it right. I know I’m not skilled with a pen, and I wish more than anything you were awake to snip at me for scratching at parchment like I have been.”

Stephen says nothing. His limbs twitch, and Jack closes his eyes. Already the sleep is fading, and the raving, exhausted, feverish Stephen will replace the silent one.

“It is an uncommon thing, the love I have for you and Sophie both. It is difficult to speak of. Loving Sophie is easy. She’s such a dear, sweet girl, and she wishes such dear, sweet things. I truly adore her. But--” Stephen tips his head back, exposing his neck, and lord, what a glorious neck. So much of the rest of him is somewhat wretched. Neither of them are handsome men, or Adonis-like, as Stephen rightly commented, but his neck, exposed like that, is nearly so. He reaches out, sponges that throat with the wrung cloth, and lets his hand linger, offering any comfort he can.

“Loving you is less easy, I hope you won’t mind me saying. You’re uncommon snappish, and you bring the strangest things into the ship with you, have the most grotesque specimens kept on your person. You use for your wig as a tea cosey, and don’t think I’ve forgotten that woolen thing you insisted upon wearing on the Lively.”

Stephen begins to pant. It’s the most horrid sound, as if he can’t bring air into his lungs. Jack helps him set up a bit in the cot, puts his own pillow behind his back and holds his lolling head in his hands.

“Stephen? Soul?”

For a moment he thinks Stephen is back with him, and his heart sings, but it is only a figment, and the delirium is back.

Jack sits back, wipes him clean once more, and turns back to his parchment.

“Dear Sophie,” he begins again, and his scratching pen and sloppy ink stop. Perhaps she will understand that he is a sailor down to his bones, and that his heart loves too much. Perhaps one day he will be able to fully explain himself. Even in his mind the notion is not clear. He wipes his hands clean of ink, ruins the remainder of the paper on the guttering flame of a candle Killick lit at three bells. The shades of his words, of his heart’s deepest desires and fears, float in the air in soot, and join Stephen’s.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are love!


End file.
